Kristel Bechara

I've always been a creative person. I was drawing, painting, coloring, cutting, and creating ever since I was a child. My late father was an artist himself. He used to make sculptures at home so, it seems that it rubbed off on me. Growing up in Lebanon though, fine art was not a field that you could have a career in so, I went into graphic design since it was the closest thing to being creative. I came to Dubai, and I landed my first job as a graphic designer after graduating but I decided to quit after five years to go back to traditional painting. It took me a while to find my signature style that you now see, the black and whites with colorful patterns. I remember the first and second pieces on Instagram and instantly selling one of them. Then people I didn’t know started asking for prices. So, I made more and sold more, and it snowballed from there. I found suppliers to print and ship. Within six months my pieces were in galleries as Osaka, Tokyo, Venice, Milan, Portofino, Brussels, and London. I started hearing about NFTs in early 2021 during covid. A friend explained it to me, and it just made sense because most of my art was digital anyway and I could now sell it without the hassle of printing and shipping. It almost “legitimized” my digital art and I didn’t have to “defend” it among the physical art world. More importantly though, it’s a totally new market and a community that I had never been a part of before. We support each other during online exhibitions and collaborate on projects. I had the opportunity to meet people that I would never have access to before. I ended up working with ArtsDao to create the Ethernal Gates series, which is their main token to access the community. A project I’m super proud of. The space might overwhelm most people, but I’ve got kids that are always on screens. They play Roblox so digital assets and their terminologies are quite normal. That shows you this is going to be quite easy for the next generation to understand and interact with even if our generation struggles. So, we need to adapt early and build our provenance as artists. Yes, it might not be user friendly at this point, however, people are building to solve these issues. Soon we won’t have to think about the tech use regular users, just like we don’t think about how the internet works right now. We won’t need to think about wallet security and crypto exchange rates and all that, we’ll just use the tech without knowing the tech.